The story data tells us about #CitizenRelay [guest post by Martin Hawksey (@mhawksey)]

Telling stories with data is a growing area for journalism and there is already a strong community around Data Driven Journalism (DDJ). I’m not journalist, by day I’m a Learning Technology Advisor for JISC CETIS, but my role does allow me to explore how data can be used within education. Often this interest spills into the evenings where I ‘play’ with data and ways to visualise the hidden stories. Here are a couple of ways I’ve been playing with data from the CitizenRelay:

A time and place

As part of the CitizenRelay Audioboo was used to record and share interviews. For a data wrangler like myself Audioboo is a nice service to work with because they provide a way to extract data from their service in a readable format. One of the undocumented options is to extract all the clips with a certain tag in a format which includes data about where the clip was recorded. Furthermore this format is readable for other services so with a couple of clicks with we can get a Google Map of CitizenRelay Boos which you can click on and find the audio clips.

One experiment I tried which didn’t entirely work out the way I wanted was to add date/time to the Audioboo data and also embed the audio player. This datafile (generated using this modified Google Spreadsheet template) can be played in Google Earth allowing to see where Boos were created, when they were created with a timeslider animation and directly playback the clips. This experiment was partially successful because I would prefer the embedded player worked without having to download Google Earth.

A look at who #CitizenRelay reporters were

So far we have mainly focused on the content but lets now look at the many eyes and ears of the CitizenRelay who helped share and create stories on Twitter.

The image shows the profile pictures of over 600 people who used the #CitizenRelay tag on Twitter so far this year. This image was generated using a free add-in for Microsoft Excel called NodeXL, read more about getting started with NodeXL. What that image doesn’t show you is how interconnected this community is. Using another free tool called Gephi and with the right data we can plot the relationships in this twitter community, who is friends with who (read more about getting started with Gephi). In the image below pictures of people are replaced with circles and friendships are depicted by drawing a line between circles.

There are almost 7,000 relationships shown in the image so it can be a bit overwhelming to digest. Using Gephi it is possible to interactively explorer individual relationships. For, example the image below shows the people I’m friends with who used the #CitizenRelay tag.

A look at what #CitizenRelay reporters said

Using the same technique for plotting relationships it’s also possible to do something similar with what people said using the #CitizenRelay tag. By plotting tweets that mention or reply to other people we get:

5 comments

[…] listen to President Peter Reid. You can learn more about the #citizen relay project in this blog posting from Martin Hawksey, Learning Technology Adviser at JISC CETIS. How many librarians you can […]

[…] meaningful. Interestingly a lot of what I cover here uses the same techniques used in my recent The story data tells us about #CitizenRelay guest post, so I’ve got an emerging templated workflow emerging which I can deploy at events which makes me […]

[…] of successful citizen journalism initiatives. The rich data generated from the project has been visualized and our own research endeavours have been captured in the form of a documentary film in partnership […]

What do you think?

#CitizenRelay is a participatory project which relies on the involvement of people from across Scotland to effectively report on the untold local stories and creative ways that Scotland’s citizens are interacting with the Olympic Games. We will be following the Olympic torch in the #citizenrelay bus from the 7th June onwards as it makes its way through Scotland. Read more details here.

We have recruited interns across Scotland to help us manage teams of citizen reporters based in hubs around the activity points of the torch relay, we also are on the look out for stories and leads, individuals and communities, organisations and physical spaces to join us in the story-telling process on and off the route. If you are interested or have an idea to share, get in touch.